Comments on: Professional Development: Getting Worse Before We Get Better

By: Graham Fletcher

Graham Fletcher — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 15:28:57 +0000

“And as they do this we offer support and mentoring as they go back into the classroom to try something out.”

This really hits home as I see most PD as a one and done experience which doesn’t lend itself to sustainability. It seems like the support and mentoring discussed here allow the implementation of PD to be layered and self-paced. I like this because it allows small teacher victories to take place along the way. Without small victories and follow-up support many teachers (myself included) feel defeated from the onset. This approach makes the big idea of the PD and the goal of successful implementation more attainable.

Appreciate you sharing this Dan, cheers!

By: Robert Kaplinsky

Robert Kaplinsky — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 15:50:22 +0000

“Then we will provide them with something vividly challenging. It might be through video or it might be through reading something. And this is really different to what they currently do.

And through this challenge we ask them to suspend their belief and try and act in new ways as if they believed differently.”

This reminds me of something I read in Made to Stick which mentions, “When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention so that we can repair them for the future.”

So once we’ve broken their guessing machine about how they think students learn/communicate/problem solve/etc. we have a ripe moment for reflection and learning new ideas.

Thanks for sharing.

By: blaw0013

blaw0013 — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 01:29:00 +0000

This observation about (math) teacher learning is quite elegantly stated. It resonates brilliantly with my experiences.

If taken seriously by the people *wishing* for math teacher change, their expectations for PD would shift significantly.

By: David Wees

David Wees — Thu, 31 Dec 2015 00:58:03 +0000

I agree with Malcolm Swan on this one although you can side-step the individual discovery phase somewhat with strategically support resources. This year in our professional development we have been doing modeling of instructional activities, followed up with regular teacher-enacted rehearsals of instructional activities (example tasks) during the professional development, followed up with designing tasks (often with teachers) aligned to a curriculum map for teachers to use in their classroom using the same instructional activities as modeled and rehearsed during the professional development and finally we've been closing the cycle with some time to reflect on the enactment. This is the first year of our four year project that we got it together to be able to support all of this and this is coincidentally also the first year of our project that we have seen any significant shift in teacher practice at any scale. Anecdotally, according to teachers reflecting on student data from a set of embedded assessments in our curriculum maps, student results have improved as well.